Chicken
by hyperiinuyasha
Summary: A mutant discovers her inspiration for pursuing the Throne.


Any major working electronics were the Holy Grail in the post-apocalyptic wastelands, being highly sought after prizes, entire crews willing to fight over mere cooking appliances. They were now rarities, either lost in the disaster that led to the world they now fight in, or lost over time, with nearly nobody having knowledge on maintaining these electronics.

So, Chicken must have had extraordinary luck to find an old portable television.

She was wandering in the jungle gathering food for herself when she found a hatch in the underbrush, a bunker of old. From her time of wandering, she identified it as a possible refuge for supplies – but knew that it could be housing danger. Used to enemies hiding within the jungle, lying in wait to ambush her for her stuff, she braced herself as she went in, ready to go slashing with her sword. However, she shortly found that the bunker was lifeless. There were no corpses, so its previous inhabitants had left eventually – probably explains the lack of aid or resources inside. What became of them? She did not think about it at the time, as her attention was completely pulled onto a small box.

Chicken's recognized the small box in trash piles and bonfires during her travels, but what made this one different from all the rest is that the screen was not broken. This box was completely intact, and it had a smaller box attached to it. The mutated bird regarded it curiously, prodding it with her feathered hands – and with that, her hand brushed against the power button. She jumped back in horror as the screen flickered on like the flash of a gun, and she was prepared to just hurl her sword straight at it.

She went from panicked to being perplexed again as she saw figures on the screen. Black and white, the figments of the past danced around the screen. Chicken was in complete awe as the figures flashed in and out of existence in weird instances of object permanence, interacting in a world of their own, completely disconnected from the dreadful world Chicken knew. What perplexed her the most about this weird box is what the figures were. She was never around when the apocalypse happened, being born and raised in its ashes. She didn't know what a human was, aside from bitter murmurings of mutants that yearned for the past. "Are these humans?" she thought to herself in trashtalk, watching two of these figures banter with each other in a language she did not understand. They had a similar body structure to those bandits that seemed to be everywhere, she observed. Did bandits evolve from humans? She had many questions to ask, but the people behind the screen could not offer an answer.

...

The bunker had been resealed, the new inhabitant sitting down in front of the television. The show was captivating, but not in the same way as it captivated in the world before. In black and white, Chicken watched a time capsule of a long-gone world. The things known as humans were completely alien, their interactions beyond what Chicken knows. No senseless violence, no suffering. Whenever somebody was hurt, they just shook it off; in fact, a noise she recognized as laughter played with each slapstick moment. People being hurt for laughs, with no real consequences, it all felt surreal.

She loved it.

Eventually, whatever was playing on the screen reached what she felt was a conclusion. The television screen switched to a shocking display of static. Chicken wondered what happened to the show until she saw a tape slip out of the other box connected to the television. Although the technology wasn't foreign to her, she was a learning creature, so she scrambled to find any similar tapes, having a vague idea of what to do.

She found other tapes and figured out how to watch other movies that provided her with different experiences. Chicken found herself particularly drawn to movies about fighting. Not fighting with guns, but with fists or swinging weapons. She related to it, preferring running in with melee weapons, just slashing or bashing aggressors apart – it felt way more exhilarating. It reminded her of her own situation. But, she felt that the people that died in the fiction did not die for real. Maybe in their own little worlds, the "dead" would get up when the camera was no longer focused on them, rather than lying on the ground as yet another casualty, as Chicken was accustomed to. Violence without true death. Something that she would really love.

Chicken found herself raising her wing to her eyes, thinking about these movies, and the idyllic worlds within them.

It's been a long time since she's cried. She understood why mutants like to fight over these things in particular.

Anyone would kill for a chance at a better world, even if it's only a mere glimpse.

And she wanted to see this fictional world become a reality again.

...

So when she met a pack of mutants on a quest for the fabled Nuclear Throne, she eagerly joined in, television and tapes in tow to entertain and remind her what she was fighting for.


End file.
